OpenClip - Copy/Paste for iPhone

One of the common complaints about Apple’s iPhone–and one that did not get solved with the launch of the iPhone 3G–is the lack of a copy-paste function. An independent developer Zac White has taken matters in his own hands and founded a non-profit, open source, community project called OpenClip which is offering iPhone developers a free Copy and Paste framework that will add this functionality to their applications.

OpenClip is not a standalone app but rather a technology that developers can incorporate into their iPhone applications, should they choose to participate. No applications yet support OpenClip, but it’s coming soon for the American Heritage Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus applications, Twitter client Twittelator, notepad application MagicPad, finance lexicon Wall Street Worlds, and a number of others.

OpenClip accomplishes this feat while still following the rules of Apple's SDK. iPhone applications are allowed to read from other application's files but only write to their own. By creating a standard location for each application's "clipboard", applications can "copy" by simply saving data locally and "paste" by pulling the most recently saved data across all applications.

iPhone users will be able to copy and paste from one OpenClip application to the next, but not to developer applications that aren’t participating or to Apple’s own iPhone apps, such as its e-mail client or the Safari browser.

A demonstration of the OpenClip is shown in GeekBrief.tv video with early versions of Twittelator, WordPress and MagicPad:

via macrumors and iphoneatlas